Irrelevant, but the phrase Sacks linkage reminds me of something that happened to me the other day. I was running off the path in Riverside Park, and crunching lumpily under my feet were a whole host of the little things that as children growing up in Wilmington, Delaware we used to call monkey balls (I think they are these, or something similar): I ruminated on the fact that at age five I do not think I knew the word balls as a synonym for testicles, I just thought of it as being balls that monkeys might throw at one another, but it seems more likely to me now that whoever coined the expression had the other sense in mind...

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About Me

I have published four novels and two books about eighteenth-century British literature; my latest book is "Reading Style: A Life in Sentences." I teach in the Department of English and Comparative Literature at Columbia University.